@Brendan, my apologies if I misunderstand you, but I believe you're saying that free access won't exist in the future. From a commercial service provider perspective, I don't think that would be a deal-breaker. After all, I'm delivering my service over a network that people spent time and money to build. However, I would be very disappointed if the available billing model was a per-node fee similar to the telco model today (e.g. SIM card with a monthly $3 fee) -- that would effectively kill a number of ideas. If there was a model where I only paid for the traffic I used (and no recurring fixed costs) then I would be quite happy with that. Of course, having free services be free would be awesome!
I think the monetization potential will be dependent on the value offered, and I'm hopeful that a network like TTN can support this (i.e. apps/services effectively and reliably operating over TTN). I think that TTN must be commercially viable in the sense that at a very minimum it must support commercial services (i.e. TTN compatible nodes, backend software, apps, etc).
That is a great point! I can imagine a future where residential and SoHo wireless routers, etc come with LoRaWAN (or other similar technologies) built in. This would truly be a game changer due to the wide spread deployment of these devices.